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RSS 3.0 12/05/14 9:57 am Published on The Caravan - A Journal of Politics and Culture (http://www.caravanmagazine.in) RSS 3.0 Mohan Bhagwat brings a resurgent Sangh to the cusp of political power By DINESH NARAYANAN | May 1, 2014 Mohd Zakir / Hindustan Times / Getty Images |ONE| IN EARLY AUGUST LAST YEAR, a cohort of journalists gathered in Kolkata for a two-day seminar on Islamic fundamentalism convened by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the world’s largest non-political voluntary organisation and the eighty-eight- year-old bedrock of Hindu nationalism in India. This was the first time the RSS, also known as the Sangh, had held such a workshop—one in a series of four, aimed specifically at journalists, on issues of significance to the organisation, including politics in Jammu and Kashmir, scheduled castes, and development. Only ideological devotees were allowed in. According to the RSS’s annual report, the four events—the others were in Delhi, Bangalore, and Ahmedabad—drew 220 participants from across the country. In Kolkata, the RSS’s prachar pramukh, or head of promotion, and the chief organiser of the event, Manmohan Vaidya, laid out the objective: to help journalists understand the nuances of the RSS’s position so they could better project the Hindu nationalist point of view. The participants were instructed that the seminar was not to be reported on, or talked about outside RSS circles. “During some sessions, we were asked to let it go in one ear and out the other,” a journalist and swayamsevak, or RSS volunteer, who works for a regional newspaper, told me. At one point, Shrirang Godbole, a homeopathic doctor from Maharashtra who serves as an Islam pundit within the Sangh, explained that the Muslim community is not monolithic, but is riven by divisions just like Hindus are by caste. He then expounded on how even “benign” sects such as Sufism have a violent past. “Some of our leaders pay homage to Sufi saints without proper understanding of history,” Godbole told them, as a slide showing the BJP leader LK Advani at the dargah in Ajmer, Rajasthan, http://www.caravanmagazine.in/print/4422 Page 1 of 15 RSS 3.0 12/05/14 9:57 am popped up on a screen. The swayamsevak-journalist said it generated a lot of laughter—even from Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS sarsanghchalak, or supreme commander, who was present throughout the workshop. “The problem is Hindus have started thinking about themselves as minorities,” Bhagwat later told the group. “Hindus should have an aggressive, nationalistic stand.” During a tea break, the journalists got chatting with Bhagwat. Inevitably, the conversation veered towards the Bharatiya Janata Party and Narendra Modi, who two months earlier had been chosen, with the backing of the RSS, to spearhead the BJP’s parliamentary election campaign. “Modi is the only person who has remained rooted in the RSS ideology,” Bhagwat told the group, adding that the RSS had told party leaders, “You find good candidates—we will do the rest.” Bhagwat said the journalists should tell BJP leaders that the party must embrace its core values—honesty in public life, and service to Hindu society. If they don’t, the party will become irrelevant. “If we win in 2014, the BJP can be in power for the next twenty-five years,” Bhagwat said. “If not, even if all of us try, they can’t be saved for the next hundred.” “The way he said it,” the journalist told me, “it felt almost like the RSS is giving the BJP one last chance.” MOHAN BHAGWAT is arguably the most powerful outsider in Indian politics today. Although the RSS publicly eschews politics, Bhagwat’s organisation supplies much of the ideological and strategic direction, as well as many leaders, to roughly three dozen affiliate groups across India. This includes the country’s largest trade union, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, which boasts over ten million members; the country’s largest student union, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad; and the country’s main opposition party, the BJP. The Sangh and its various offshoots, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, or Sangh family, run more than 150,000 projects across the country, including educational, tribal welfare and Hindu religious programmes. The sarsanghchalak is considered the “guide and philosopher” of the entire movement. Since he was elevated to the post in 2009, Bhagwat has skilfully rallied the RSS and its affiliates to help the BJP prepare for and fight what have become the most significant elections since 1971, when Indira Gandhi took the Congress party to a massive victory and consolidated her personal power. Bhagwat’s comments in Kolkata captured a large part of what now seems to be at stake: the ascendancy of the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate, Modi—and therefore of the RSS’s vision for India as a Hindu nation. But they also reflected long- standing frictions between the RSS and its most conspicuous offspring. For two decades, since the climactic destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the subsequent establishment of the first BJP-led government, there has been a widening chasm between the RSS, whose full-time members are supposed to practice a celibate austerity meant to keep them singularly focused on the fulfilment of the organisation’s aims, and the leaders of an increasingly fractured BJP, who are often seen to be lusting after modern luxuries and personal power. Many in the party believe that the RSS does not understand politics. “The Hindutva element of the party has increased over the years,” a senior BJP leader and former cabinet minister in the party’s National Democratic Alliance government told me. “People with inadequate political understanding are pitchforked into the party.” For their part, RSS leaders contend that the party has compromised its ideology and strayed too far from RSS influence. The reality, however, seems to be that the RSS and the party need each other if they are to thrive, or perhaps even survive. Although Modi has been the focal point for much of the media debate about the BJP’s chances of success, Bhagwat, more than anyone else, may govern the party’s fortunes. The Sangh family has a highly disciplined volunteer army that is the envy of every political outfit in the country, and the BJP understands that it would be severely crippled without the support of this force. At the same time, Bhagwat appears to realise that the RSS’s best chance of achieving its goals—assimilating Indian society to a particular set of Hindu norms, and achieving Param Vaibhav, or ultimate glory, for Bharat (as the organisation prefers to call India) by making it the vishwa guru, or guide to the world—is with the active support of a strong, sympathetic government. As one joint general secretary of the RSS put it, “as long as no party in India is in a position to get at least 40 percent of the votes or a two-thirds majority, you can’t get anything done.” Although Bhagwat seemed to imply in Kolkata that he is giving the BJP a final shot, the RSS, too, has been battling with problems that strike at the core of its existence. Since its inception in 1925, the organisation’s central pillar has been the shakha system of local branches, where volunteers are trained and potential full-time workers, or pracharaks, are recruited; some young swayamsevaks begin attending shakhas soon after they learn to walk. The RSS has an impressive forty-five thousand of these branches nationwide, of which two thousand reportedly sprouted up during the first quarter of this year. But several people within the Sangh family, including a swayamsevak who is also a former Madhya Pradesh state minister, told me that, in recent years, many of these branches were thinly attended; the organisation struggled to attract child volunteers and full-time workers—who http://www.caravanmagazine.in/print/4422 Page 2 of 15 RSS 3.0 12/05/14 9:57 am must dedicate their most productive years to the Sangh and are in return assured of nothing but a cot to sleep on at an RSS office—especially in the face of proliferating career and lifestyle opportunities. Widely reported examples of the all-male RSS displaying sexism, homophobia, and religious bigotry have also alienated it from less extreme sections of the population. Perhaps more threatening to the organisation is its reputation for breeding intolerance and violence among its members, whose actions have led to the RSS being banned several times by the government. Recent allegations made to The Caravan by the Sangh leader Swami Aseemanand—that senior RSS members including Bhagwat sanctioned his plot to launch a series of bombings in which 119 people were eventually killed between 2006 and 2008—briefly renewed a debate about whether the organisation should be allowed to exist at all. (After several attempts to arrange an interview with Bhagwat, Manmohan Vaidya told me it would not be possible, “not because of the Caravan story, but because he is not talking to the media until the elections are over.”) According to the political analyst and editor of the Hindi weekly Yathavat, Ram Bahadur Rai—who along with KN Govindacharya was part of the Bihar Chhatra Andolan, the first RSS-backed political movement (which eventually snowballed into an anti- corruption campaign spearheaded by Jayaprakash Narayan against the Indira Gandhi government, and culminated in the Emergency)—“Bhagwat has two tasks before him. One is to reform the BJP. The other is to reform the Sangh.” To a great extent, Bhagwat has already begun to stall the drift in the Sangh family.